March 3rd, 2008 by metapilot
In the quest for driving visitors to the blog, I ran across a site that has had quite a bit of commentary about it over the past six months or so. It’s called blogcatalog.com and it’s value has been discussed by many online including Andy Beard, Sphinn, and problogger –just to name a few. I think I’ll join in and see what all the action is about.
February 13th, 2008 by metapilot
Yes, METAPILOT is a local Miami Company. Check out our site here: Miami search engine optimization . We’re available by phone or in person to speak with you about meeting your site’s sales goals.
Everyone should understand the difference between rankings and profitability.
There are numerous companies out there that speak primarily about getting you rankings for keywords. On the surface it may look good but when you look more closely and correlate your web stats with your marketing spend and your online sales, you can get the feeling that things are a little too heavy on the budget side and much too little light on the sales side. Working with a company that is focused on your business goals and your profitability on the other hand, a company experiences a symbiotic relationship between their traffic, sales, and search engine optimization budget.
September 4th, 2006 by metapilot
You may have read recently (August 2006) that AOL inadvertently released information about searches done through the AOL site. SEO Scoop discovered a forum post detailing the click through rate for ranking #1 vs. #2-#10. While AOL users, as a group, do tend to be less web savvy than the average web user, the sample size is large enough that we can now make more educated guesses about the way people use search engines.
Results from:
Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623
In the above sample of 4,926,623 clicks,
2,075,765 of the clicks (42.1%) were on the #1 ranked result.;
586,100 of the clicks (11.9%) were on the #2 ranked result (3.5 x fewer clicks than the #1 position);
418,643 of the clicks (8.5%) were on the #3 ranked result (1.4 x fewer clicks than the #2 position):
298,532 of the clicks (6.1%) were on the #4 ranked result (1.4 x fewer clicks than the #3 position)
242,169 of the clicks (4.9%) were on the #5 ranked result (1.2 x fewer clicks than the #4 position)
199,541 of the clicks (4.1%) were on the #6 ranked result (1.2 x fewer clicks than the #5 position)
168,080 of the clicks (3.4%) were on the #7 ranked result (1.2 x fewer clicks than the #6 position)
148,489 of the clicks (3.0%) were on the #8 ranked result (1.1 x fewer clicks than the #7 position)
140,356 of the clicks (2.8%) were on the #9 ranked result (1.05 x fewer clicks than the #8 position)
147,551 of the clicks (3.0%) were on the #10 ranked result (1.05 x more clicks than the #9 position)
September 1st, 2006 by metapilot
Following Google’s lead, Yahoo has came out with their own version of a sitemaps tool and rolled into the the Yahoo Site Explorer Beta tool. There is a lot of debate over the value of Google’s sitemap tool and Yahoo doesn’t really make any advances over it. One nice thing about it, though, is that you can now easily get the last-crawled date for any page that you have listed in “My Sites” (you have to have a free yahoo acount in order to access My Sites information).
In order to set up a new site in Yahoo Site Explorer, enter the site’s URL and click “Add My Site”, afterwhich you’re presented with links to Manage and Authenticate your new site. The coolest thing about the tool is that you can communicate to Yahoo that you want it to visit your site and it will go there and grab your feed in “real time”. Your feed can be RSS, Atom, a txt file or a compressed text file (.gz only) and by real time, I mean that you might have to wait a few minutes for it to refresh your screen and show you that it’s verified your feed exists.
The feed is the conduit through/by which you are telling Yahoo about URLs you want it to crawl. Google Sitemaps adds an additional conduit, or feed choice– a .xml file with which you can make your list of URLs dynamic by running a python script on your web server and I expect to see something of that nature coming from Yahoo in the near future. Very basically, though, all you need for Yahoo Site Explorer is a .txt file with a list all the URLs on your site that you wnat crawled (one URL per line) named urllist.txt.. Upload it to your root directory and after you click on “Manage Site” in Yahoo Site Explorer, type “urllist.txt” into the field and off goes the bot to check it out.
Before you can get to the “good” information about your site, you have to authenticate your site. This lets Yahoo know that you currently have access to the site’s rood directory, which means you’re likely to worthy of knowing the any little insights Yahoo Site Explorer might provide you. Whey you click on the “Authenticate” link, you can choose to download an authentication file (which you can save directly to your root directory, if you want) or make your own authentication file with the file name and contents presented. Once the file is placed in your root directory, click “Authenticate” and your site gets put into a pending authenication que until Yahoo crawls the feed. Within 24 hours, I could see that my status was no longer “Pending” but rather, I was now a “processed” site.
On to the real business, Yahoo has racheted up the number of indexed pages to 12. It’s good to see things filling in there. Over on the marginally more useful Google Webmaster Tools, I can see that the index is ranking the old site for some odd keywords, however zero traffic comes from any of his old link partners or search engine listings–at least not from anyone directly clicking on a link.
August 28th, 2006 by metapilot
I do a lot of optimization support for web design firms who have clients needing a dedicated search engine consultant. I love these jobs because I get to work with a lot good web designers and a lot of good clients that I probably wouldn’t have gotten to work with otherwise.Something I see more and more often in firms that have several designers is that there is a premium on those designers who have a keen eye for the designs, templates and techniques that assist search engine visibility. What’s most noticeable about them is that they don’t seem to stay in one place very long. It’s hard to blame them, it’s hard to turn down a pay raise and the opportunity to do what you really like doing at the same time.
Web site design and programming that is compatible with the efforts of the optimization specialist is highly prized today and the designer who specializes in search compatibility and likes partnering with algorithm specialists and SEO copywriters is like the holy grail. A site can sure move up to the top quickly when all the players are focused and determined to out rank the competitors.
Web Designers: When you’re commencing work on a site that will have a web site optimizer working on it–think CRAWLABILITY. This is the time to work on platform and navigaion. What will the spiders, which are just high-powered browsers with the JavaScript and images turned off, see? If you want to see what a page looks like to the spiders, take a peek at it through the SEO Browser–it can give you a whole new perspective on your web creations. Time spent thinking about these things early on is well spent because if you have to deal with them once the site goes live, you can count on it taking a lot longer and and you can count on having a lot more people breathing down your neck as you do it.
Templates
On-Page Factors
Navigation
Meta Tags
For more info, check out our meta tag optimization service.
August 19th, 2006 by metapilot
Real estate of all types is very competitive in Florida and with the market going through the changes it has recently, it’s getting more so every day. This increase in competitiveness is very evident online, where real estate oriented website owners are putting substantial resources towards optimization for their sites in order to reach more online traffic.
All of this means several things for new real estate oriented sites: 1) It is taking quite a bit more effort for new sites to reach traffic-producing search engine rankings on primary keywords. 2) Niche keyword spaces are getting more difficult to find. 3) It is taking increased vigilance to defend your rankings from other sites who want to claw their way up into higher rankings.
Firms who are not competing directly against mainstream realtors do have it somewhat easier, though. A strong optimization campaign can find keywords that will bring in traffic, yet doesn’t pit them against all the “heavy hitters” engaged in real estate search marketing. Such a campaign would enable Signature Residences to bring in targeted traffic while their website matures and gains strength over the next 12 months. In addition to optimization of the existing site, it is recommended that these companies focus on adding to the site’s content and that it strive to develop strong back links to its site as a foundation for continued strong rankings in the future.
